This is sadly predictable, since part of the benefit of college comes not from classes and studying but from the people you meet. For poor kids, this can mean learning about better career options from more privileged peers. But for rich kids, it can mean networking with other rich kids, creating and cementing the exclusive social groups that give access to very lucrative job and investment opportunities later in life. This high-powered networking effect is probably strongest for white men, who continue to dominate the upper ranks of the corporate hierarchy and the investor class, and for whom college networks can act as a gateway to that social world.
So college is very important for the poor, but it may be even more beneficial for the rich — especially the rich, white and male. Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer to that problem. Abolishing the college system would almost certainly hurt the poor, and rich white men would probably find some other way to form good-old-boy networks. A better solution would be to make college social networks more egalitarian — to somehow ensure that rich white men make lots of friends who are women, minorities, and people from less advantaged backgrounds during their formative years. That’s easier said than done. But colleges should be thinking about how to promote such a mixing of human networks.
Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.
This column was provided by Bloomberg News.